After over three months’ journeying, the pioneer company reached the valley of the Great Salt Lake; and at the first sight of it, Brigham Young declared it to be the halting place—­the gathering center for the Saints.  But what was there inviting in this wilderness spread out like a scroll barren of inviting message, and empty but for the picture it presented of wondrous scenic grandeur?  Looking from the Wasatch barrier, the colonists gazed upon a scene of entrancing though forbidding beauty.  A barren, arid plain, rimmed by mountains like a literal basin, still occupied in its lowest parts by the dregs of what had once filled it to the brim; no green meadows, not a tree worthy the name, scarce a patch of greensward to entice the adventurous wanderers into the valley.  The slopes were covered with sagebrush, relieved by patches of chaparral oak and squaw-bush; the wild sunflower lent its golden hue to intensify the sharp contrasts.  Off to the westward lay the lake, making an impressive, uninviting picture in its severe, unliving beauty; from its blue wastes somber peaks rose as precipitous islands, and about the shores of this dead sea were saline flats that told of the scorching heat and thirsty atmosphere of this parched region.  A turbid river ran from south to north athwart the valley, “dividing it in twain,” as a historian of the day has written, “as if the vast bowl in the intense heat of the Master Potter’s fires, in process of formation had cracked asunder.”  Small streams of water started in rippling haste from the snow-caps of the mountains toward the lake, but most of them were devoured by the thirsty sands of the valley before their journey was half completed.

Such was the scene of desolation that greeted the pioneer band.  A more forsaken spot they had not passed in all their wanderings.  And is this the promised land?  This is the very place of which Bridger spake when he proffered a thousand dollars in gold for the first bushel of grain that could be raised here.  With such a Canaan spread out before them, was it not wholly pardonable if some did sigh with longing for the leeks and flesh-pots of the Egypt they had left, or wished to pass by this land and seek a fairer home?  Two of the three women who belonged to the party were utterly disappointed.  “Weak, worn, and weary as I am,” said one of these heroines, “I would rather push on another thousand miles than stay here.”

But the voice of their leader was heard.  “The very place,” said Brigham Young, and in his prophetic mind there rose a vision of what was to come.  Not for a moment did he doubt the future.  He saw a multitude of towns and cities, hamlets and villas filling this and neighboring valleys, with the fairest of all, a city whose beauty of situation, whose wealth of resource should become known throughout the world, rising from the most arid site of the burning desert before him, hard by the barren salt shores of the watery waste.  There in the very heart of the parched wilderness should stand the House of the Lord, with other temples in valleys beyond the horizon of his gaze.